“Manifestly it is better to use simple tools expertly than to possess a
bewildering assortment of complicated gadgets and either neglect or
use them incompetently”. (1947 Tom Rolt)

If you dont know who Tom Rolt was, you probably should…checkout this link Tom Rolt

Time to start blogging again I think. Mainly to share useful items of information I find and as a brain dump for useful things I may forget. Current area of interest is all things Android, coding, using etc.

As an OS Android will nice when its competed, but at least they didnt intentionally cripple it (ie like a certain iThings Bluetooth), but neither the iThing nor Android seems capable of doing the things my Palm III did nearly ten years ago. From an application and UI point of view its as if no-one has learned from what went before. (I could now have a tirade about mlearning, but I wont. No point, theres so man folk out there are too busy trying to make their own magic beans to stand on the shoulders of any giants).

I regularly use two desktop machines and two laptops.

Both desktop machines now run Ubuntu Linux. The laptop still has Windows on it for those odd bits of development work for which I am forced to use Windows. One desktop has been set for dual boot, mainly so I can continue to use cubase for music applications.

All the Linux machines also have a copy of VirtualBox installed under which I have a virtualised copy of Windows XP. Why? well I have some projects that require Visual Studio or MS Project. Having virtual box means I can run those without rebooting the machine into Windows. Most of the time the virtualised version of windows is indistinguishable from running natively on the machine.

Weird Side Effects

Yup there are some weird side-effects of doing this. In some cases its been a fight getting MY DATA out of propriety formats into more open formats (often plain text). Strangely each time you manage to extract your data it feels like you are getting something back. Its as is those ********s in redmond had confiscated your data and are now being forced to hand it back.

Its not a perfect solution OpenOffice is annoying, but not as annoying as Microsoft Office.

The other benefit is pushing to use a non microsoft solution will probably annoy your Innovation Prevention department….

A number of colleagues have gone the same route, other have gone to a Mac and use Parallels to use Windows if they really have to. (normally to comply with badly written written web applications implemented by Innovation Prevention Departments who have not worked out that a web based app should work on something other than a internet exploder on a Windows machine)

Thanks to some handy notes here my task was made much easier. The steps I took were

A copy of the files and the script to install them are here jtztedongle but if you do download them you use them at your own risk.

The steps based on the information available here are shown below in the script I used.

#!/bin/bash
#see notes at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1017630
#should install required stuff to allow ZTE MF627 Broadband dongle as sold by
#3 in the UK to work on Ubuntu
#for later in the script I want todays date and time
the_date=`date +%y%m%d_%H%M%S`
#I downloaded usb mode switch
#from http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/usb-modeswitch_0.9.5_i386.deb
#1)install usb mode switch
dpkg -i usb-modeswitch_0.9.5_i386.deb
#2)
#first we’ll back up existing one
mv /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf.jon.$the_date
cp usb_modeswitch.conf /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf
#3)Create udev ruls
cp 999-zte.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/999-zte.rules
#4)
cp 20-zte-mf628+.fdi /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/20thirdparty/20-zte-mf628+.fdi

To work round the policy kit weirdness there are some notes here which is where I finally got my solution

in short, login to a terminal

sudo -s

ck-launch-session users-admin

or if you want o admin services

ck-launch-session  services-admin

and volia the unlock button is no longer greyed out.

Well I’ve just been along to another excellent event about technology in education and yet again we could not fully utilise technology due to institutional network access policies, implemented by another Innovation Prevention Department.

Meantime at BETT apparently theres no decent free wifi access.

OK sometimes if you are very very very lucky and sign an “I wont do bad things on the network” you may get port 80 access. (ie for the un-initiated web access) and probably no https. Well gee thanks, but sorry port 80 just doesnt cut it.

Time to stop justy accepting this and complaining more.

As Ive said before in education cyberspace no one can hear you scream because its blocked by the firewall.